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But he left open the possibility the infection could have come from a commercial laboratory located on the same site that is also responsible for handling foot and mouth and developing vaccines against it.
"The IAH operates under strict biosecurity procedures," Martin Shirley, the director of the Institute for Animal Health said in a statement. "Checks ... have shown no breaches of our procedures."
"We have been able to check our records specifically for use of this strain. Our results show limited use within laboratory within the past four weeks," he said.
Shirley said the strain that infected 60 head of cattle on a farm around 8km from the IAH laboratory had been in production at a laboratory on the same site as the IAH run by Merial, a US-French joint venture company.
Merial is one of the world's leading animal health firms. It is jointly owned by US drugmaker Merck & Co. Inc. and Sanofi-Aventis SA.
A spokesperson for Merial said on Sunday it had voluntarily halted production of vaccines at the site as a precaution.
Defra, Britain's department for agriculture, said in a statement on Saturday that the strain of foot and mouth that infected the cattle had been produced by Merial as recently as July 2007. Merial was not available to comment on that.
The latest outbreak comes six years after a foot and mouth crisis that devastated British farming, with more than 6 million animals culled and countrywide tourism affected, at a total cost estimated at £8.5bn.
